#1 NASA SpaceApps Challenge Report

More questions than answers

187 locations, 69 countries, 25,000+ participants

Huntsville, Alabama and Palo Alto, California: “How can we explore the deep space of our universe if we don’t know its deepest infrastructure?” asked Bruce Camber, talking with NASA scientists about space exploration. “How can we explore this universe if some of our most basic assumptions are off?” He continued, “This is a case of not knowing what we don’t know.” He then said, “Many of our intellectual elites want to throw out space-and-time as well as infinity.” Referring particularly to the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, Max Tegmark and Alan Guth of MIT, Roger Penrose of Oxford, and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge, he said, “Not one of them has a clue about the first 67 notations that just might help us to define our universe. These 67 are part of 202 highly-ordered, totally-interrelated mathematical groups of numbers and geometries. By using the first four Planck units and base-2 exponential notation, we started from the first moment and went out 13.8 billion years to the current moment of time. These simple numbers could possibly define the universe better than any other group of numbers and geometries. There is something telling me, probably just my simple logic, that these are the foundations of the foundations of our physical world.” [1]

An introduction to a new map of the universe using just Planck units

History lessons. Though Max Planck developed the basic math for these units between 1899 and 1905, it wasn’t until 2001 when a Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek of MIT lifted these numbers out of the category of numerology. He had written a series of articles, Scaling Mt. Planck [3] (2001) and slowly the Planck units began becoming part of the core of accepted scientific thought.

In 1957 Kees Boeke, a high school teacher in Holland, did a scale of the universe using base-10. [4] That slowly became an iMax movie, popular books, and a key dynamic within cosmological studies.[5,6,7] Albeit quite limited, this work was the first scale of the universe using known information from the smallest scale to the largest scale.

It was a first, but that map did not happen quite soon enough. Hawking, Alan Guth and so many others had hardened their positions around the big bang even if it contradicted commonsense and was a forced-fit for science.

Since 2011 the big-board chart, an ever-so-simple and all-natural process of multiplying and dividing by 2, has been taken to new levels. Called base-2 exponentiation, this map of the universe opens unknown territories, secret doors, and unexpected challenges. Camber commented, “It appears that this Big-Board, base-2 model simulates the big bang epochs but without a bang. It’s a natural inflation, a quiet expansion, where everything is necessarily related to everything. It’s an integrative model and it flies in the face of today’s cultural nihilism-and-solipsism which has been encouraged by the big bang.”

Now, there is more to come. This is the first of several summaries about the NASA SpaceApps Challenge, April 29-30, 2017 in 187 locations, 69 countries, with over 25,000 participants. Bruce Camber drove up from New Orleans to Huntsville to participate. Timothy Wang, a Silicon Valley NASA systems analyst, and Charlotte Thornton, a Stanford Visiting Scholar, started the process with a focus on the Big Board-little universe data set and then their team grew and grew. These reports will interview everybody involved and will review their expectations for the near future.